Pound Poetry Quotes

You should date a girl who reads. Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes, who has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve. Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she has found the book she wants. You see that weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a secondhand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow and worn. She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book. Buy her another cup of coffee. Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice. It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas, for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry and in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does. She has to give it a shot somehow. Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world. Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who read understand that all things must come to end, but that you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two. Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series. If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are. You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype. You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots. Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads. Or better yet, date a girl who writes.

Speak against unconscious oppression, Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative, Speak against bonds.

I desired my dust to be mingled with yours Forever and forever and forever.

Rhythm must have meaning.

It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse.

Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.

They wanted to come in after the pounds", explained Pooh, "so I let them. It's the best way to write poetry, letting things come.

Sanjit says his apartment, the same one in which he grew up, has been flooded many times by the midsummer torrents. For what has been for millennia a primarily agricultural society, rains simultaneously destroy, create, and preserve life in India, similar to the functions of the three premier Hindu gods, Shiva, Brahma, and Vishnu. Every time Kolkata gets pounded by a cyclone, or when the monsoon first erupts in June (although the recent warming of the Indian Ocean increasingly disturbs a once-consistent timeline), Sanjit never fails to send along a video, his house flooded – seemingly destroyed – but the smiles on his, Bajju’s, or other house-guest’s faces signify just the opposite, having been cooled and relieved of perpetual heat. Flooded, they remain preserved.

people used to tell me that i had beautiful hands told me so often, in fact, that one day i started to believe them until i asked my photographer father, “hey daddy could i be a hand model” to which he said no way, i dont remember the reason he gave me and i wouldve been upset, but there were far too many stuffed animals to hold too many homework assignment to write, too many boys to wave at too many years to grow, we used to have a game, my dad and i about holding hands cus we held hands everywhere, and every time either he or i would whisper a great big number to the other, pretending that we were keeping track of how many times we had held hands that we were sure, this one had to be 8 million 2 thousand 7 hundred and fifty three. hands learn more than minds do, hands learn how to hold other hands, how to grip pencils and mold poetry, how to tickle pianos and dribble a basketball, and grip the handles of a bicycle how to hold old people, and touch babies , i love hands like i love people, they're the maps and compasses in which we navigate our way through life, some people read palms to tell your future, but i read hands to tell your past, each scar marks the story worth telling, each calloused palm, each cracked knuckle is a missed punch or years in a factory, now ive seen middle eastern hands clenched in middle eastern fists pounding against each other like war drums, each country sees theyre fists as warriors and others as enemies. even if fists alone are only hands. but this is not about politics, no hands arent about politics, this is a poem about love, and fingers. fingers interlock like a beautiful zipper of prayer. one time i grabbed my dads hands so that our fingers interlocked perfectly but he changed positions, saying no that hand hold is for your mom. kids high five, but grown ups, we learn how to shake hands, you need a firm hand shake,but dont hold on too tight, but dont let go too soon, but dont hold down for too long, but hands are not about politics, when did it become so complicated. i always thought its simple. the other day my dad looked at my hands, as if seeing them for the first time, and with laughter behind his eye lids, with all the seriousness a man of his humor could muster, he said you know you got nice hands, you could’ve been a hand model, and before the laughter can escape me, i shake my head at him, and squeeze his hand, 8 million 2 thousand 7hundred and fifty four.

When I Was One-And-Twenty When I was one-and-twenty I heard a wise man say, “Give crowns and pounds and guineas But not your heart away; Give pearls away and rubies But keep your fancy free.” But I was one-and-twenty, No use to talk to me. When I was one-and-twenty I heard him say again, “The heart out of the bosom Was never given in vain; ’Tis paid with sighs a plenty And sold for endless rue.” And I am two-and-twenty, And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.

Let the gods speak softly of us

The Garden En robe de parade. - Samain Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens, And she is dying piece-meal of a sort of emotional anaemia. And round about there is a rabble Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor. They shall inherit the earth. In her is the end of breeding. Her boredom is exquisite and excessive. She would like some one to speak to her, And is almost afraid that I will commit that indiscretion.

When I carefully consider the curious habits of dogs I am compelled to conclude That man is the superior animal. When I consider the curious habits of man I confess, my friend, I am puzzled

And round about there is a rabble Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor. They shall inherit the earth.

Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.

I like the lady horses best, how they make it all look easy, like running 40 miles per hour is as fun as taking a nap, or grass. I like their lady horse swagger, after winning. Ears up, girls, ears up! But mainly, let’s be honest, I like that they’re ladies. As if this big dangerous animal is also a part of me, that somewhere inside the delicate skin of my body, there pumps an 8-pound female horse heart, giant with power, heavy with blood. Don’t you want to believe it? Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see the huge beating genius machine that thinks, no, it knows, it’s going to come in first.

The committed student needs to be wide awake, to look and listen closely, to slow down, scrutinize and reflect. The language of poetry is so dense, so multivalent, that it demands a concentrated act of attention — and offers its greatest rewards only to those who reread.

I once saw a small child go to an electric light switch as say, "Mamma, can I open the light?" She was using the age-old language of exploration, the language of art. It was a sort of metaphor, but she was not using it as ornamentation.

L'art Green arsenic smeared on an egg-white cloth, Crushed strawberries! Come, let us feast our eyes.

But I am like the grass, I can not love you.

Why do you look so eagerly and so curiously into people’s faces, / Will you find your lost dead among them?

ENDURANCE I don't know you, But I love you, Just as God loves me and you. The sun and the moon Are opposing forces, But they still greet each other, Peacefully, As one awakens in the morning, Just as the other goes to sleep. Life has pounded me down And thrashed me around, Time and time again, But I always get right back up, Because I still love life - Just as the earth still loves The rain.

Mother Earth, one of my absolute favorite places......where the sounds, the energy, the beauty and the Life pounds into your every fiber of being, letting you Know that you are alive. I will always respect and honor this gift of creation that we call our home.

Aimlessly It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No One listens to poetry. — from "Thing Language

Sealing your lips makes your eyes talk Truth creeps beneath your lame feet’s walk Knees stiffen when blood vessels stalk A pounding heart’s lies hard as rock

On No Work of Words On no work of words now for three lean months in the bloody Belly of the rich year and the big purse of my body I bitterly take to task my poverty and craft: To take to give is all, return what is hungrily given Puffing the pounds of manna up through the dew to heaven, The lovely gift of the gab bangs back on a blind shaft. To lift to leave from the treasures of man is pleasing death That will rake at last all currencies of the marked breath And count the taken, forsaken mysteries in a bad dark. To surrender now is to pay the expensive ogre twice. Ancient woods of my blood, dash down to the nut of the seas If I take to burn or return this world which is each man's work.

Carcharadon carcharias. Six thousand pounds of muscle powering a hoop of butcher's knives. The only animal that ate its weaker siblings in the womb. Immune from cancer. Constantly awake.

Poetry consists in so rendering concrete objects that the emotions produced by the objects shall arise in the reader….

And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban nights are like the night there. I have looked down across the city from high windows. It is then that the great buildings lose reality and take on their magical powers. They are immaterial; that is to say, one sees but the lighted windows. Squares after squares of flame, set and cut into the Aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.

The public will buy a certain amount of poetry if you give them their striptease.” -- Ezra Pound

The fancy things I like are sheets. Pots and pans. And the things I really like aren't fancy at all: old aprons and hankies. Butter wrappers from one pound blocks. Peony bushes, hardback books of poetry. And I like things less than that; the sticky remains at the bottom of the apple crisp dish. The way cats sometimes run sideways. The presence of a rainbow in a puddle of oil. Mayonaise jars. Pussy willows. Wash on a line. The tick-tock of clocks, the blue of the neon sign at the local movie house. The fact that there is a local movie house.

FRANCESCA You came in out of the night And there were flowers in your hands, Now you will come out of a confusion of people, Out of a turmoil of speech about you. I who have seen you amid the primal things Was angry when they spoke your name In ordinary places. I would that the cool waves might flow over my mind, And that the world should dry as a dead leaf, Or as a dandelion seed-pod and be swept away, So that I might find you again, Alone.

The important fact is that for the man the act is eternal, and that for the brief space he has to live, he is already dead. He is already in a different world from ours. He has crossed the frontier. The important fact is that something is done which can not be undone-a possibility which none of us realize until we face it ourselves.

Don't imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music, or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as the average piano teacher spends on the art of music. Be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright, or try to conceal it. Don't allow "influence" to mean merely that you mop up the particular decorative vocabulary of some one or two poets who you happen to admire.

Another struggle has been the struggle to keep the value of a local and particular character, of a particular culture in this awful maelstrom, this awful avalanche toward uniformity. The whole fight is for the conservation of the individual soul. The enemy is the supression of history; against us is the bewildering propaganda and brainwash, luxury and violence. Sixty years ago, poetry was the poor man’s art: a man off on the edge of the wilderness, or Frémont, going off with a Greek text in his pocket. A man who wanted the best could have it on a lonely farm. Then there was the cinema, and now television.

Song of myself With music strong I come, with my cornets and my drums, I play not marches for accepted victors only, I play marches for conquer'd and slain persons. Have you heard that it was good to gain the day? I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won. I beat and pound for the dead, I blow through my embouchures my loudest and gayest for them. Vivas to those who have fail'd! And to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea! And to those themselves who sank in the sea! And to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes! And the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known!

Come, my songs, let us speak of perfection— / We shall get ourselves rather disliked.

Love thou thy dream All base love scorning, Love thou the wind And here take warning That dreams alone can truly be, For 'tis in dream I come to thee. Ezra Pound, The Song trad. Ungaretti: Ama il tuo sogno Ama il tuo sogno Ogni inferiore amore disprezzando, Il vento ama Ed accorgiti qui Che i sogni solo possono veramente essere, Perciò in sogno a raggiungerti m’avvio.

The sand lay blue in the moonlight and the iron tires of the wagons rolled among the shapes of the riders in gleaming hoops that veered and wheeled woundedly and vaguely navigational like slender astrolabes and the polished shoes of the horses kept hasping up like a myriad eyes winking across the desert floor. They watched storms out there so distant they could not be heard, the silent lightning flaring sheetwise and the thin black spine of the mountain chain fluttering and sucked away again in the dark. They saw wild horses racing on the plain, pounding their shadows down the night and leaving in the moonlight a vaporous dust like the palest stain of their passing.

It burns, I know. It burns now, now that the story is over, now that the daybreak is liquid, now that my knees don't creak anymore and the leaves are blowing and the highway is humming, and a few extra pounds is not a terminal diagnosis. It burns in me too healing me but the ache is not for you. It's for my passion. That used to be your name. And it's sad, really. The sting of too little too late.

Нет такой формы банальности, которую нельзя без труда превратить в пятистопный ямб. Если человек научился считать до десяти, ему не сложно начать новую строку с каждого одиннадцатого слога или отбивать каждый второй слог с ударением.

MIDNIGHT SONG OF WU In Chang'an city is the disk of the moon, The sound of pounding clothes in ten thousand households. The autumn wind is blowing without cease, All the time I think of Yuguan pass. When will we pacify the pillaging Hu, So my husband can end his long journey?

The story of the rapper and the story of the hustler are like rap itself, two kinds of rhythm working together, having a conversation with each other, doing more together than they could do apart. It's been said that the thing that makes rap special, that makes it different both from pop music and from written poetry, is that it's built around two kinds of rhythm. The first kind of rhythm is the meter. In poetry, the meter is abstract, but in rap, the meter is something you literally hear: it's the beat. The beat in a song never stops, it never varies. No matter what other sounds are on the track, even if it's a Timbaland production with all kinds of offbeat fills and electronics, a rap song is usually built bar by bar, four-beat measure by four-beat measure. It's like time itself, ticking off relentlessly in a rhythm that never varies and never stops. When you think about it like that, you realize the beat is everywhere, you just have to tap into it. You can bang it out on a project wall or an 808 drum machine or just use your hands. You can beatbox it with your mouth. But the beat is only one half of a rap song's rhythm. The other is the flow. When a rapper jumps on a beat, he adds his own rhythm. Sometimes you stay in the pocket of the beat and just let the rhymes land on the square so that the beat and flow become one. But sometimes the flow cops up the beat, breaks the beat into smaller units, forces in multiple syllables and repeated sounds and internal rhymes, or hangs a drunken leg over the last bap and keeps going, sneaks out of that bitch. The flow isn't like time, it's like life. It's like a heartbeat or the way you breathe, it can jump, speed up, slow down, stop, or pound right through like a machine. If the beat is time, flow is what we do with that time, how we live through it. The beat is everywhere, but every life has to find its own flow. Just like beats and flows work together, rapping and hustling, for me at least, live through each other. Those early raps were beautiful in their way and a whole generation of us felt represented for the first time when we heard them. But there's a reason the culture evolved beyond that playful, partying lyrical style. Even when we recognized the voices, and recognized the style, and even personally knew the cats who were on the records, the content didn't always reflect the lives we were leading. There was a distance between what was becoming rap's signature style - the relentlessness, the swagger, the complex wordplay - and the substance of the songs. The culture had to go somewhere else to grow. It had to come home.

I have heard a hundred housebroken Ezra Pounds. They should all be freed. It is long since I was a herdsman.

How are you? I'm shattered, thanks, how are you? I walk aimlessly through the rooms of my house, what have you been up to? I have woken up in the middle of the last 240 nights in a heart-pounding sweat, what's new with you? I sometimes wish I would never wake up, have you been on vacation this year? I ache for the arms of my sweetheart to hold me tight, how's your family? I feel barren and useless and creepy and mundane, seen any good movies lately? I'm terrified that I'll feel this way forever, I like that sweater you're wearing. I keep seeing his body on the hospital gurney, don't you love this weather. My broken heart is in my throat, let's do lunch. I'm so completely and utterly tired of being sad, thanks, how are you?

Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves.(...) That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own. However, thanks to the toils of those obscure women in the past, of whom I wish we knew more, thanks, curiously enough, to two wars, the Crimean which let Florence Nightingale out of her drawing-room, and the European War which opened the doors to an average woman some sixty years later, these evils are in the way to be bettered. Otherwise you [the female students listening to the talk] would not be here tonight, and your chance of earning five hundred pounds a year, precarious as I am afraid that it still is, would be minute in the extreme. A Room of One's Own Chapter 6

The starry sky began to shine,when assigned night spread with its ‘moon lamp’ for all of the wistful thoughts,lay below the tormented Earth’s nocturnal light and those splendid visions caught my pounding spirits.

And so the space Of my still consciousness Is full of gilded snow, The which, no cat has eyes enough To see the brightness of. — Ezra Pound, from “Middle-Aged,” Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, 1912–22. Edited by Harriet Monroe. (Chicago, 1912–22)

I never cared for poetry," I said. "Your loss," Sim said absently as he turned a few pages. "Eld Vintic poetry's thunderous. It pounds at you." "What's the meter like?"I asked, curious despite myself. "I don't know anything about meter," Simmon said distractedly he ran his finger down the page in front of him. "It's like this: "Sought we the Scrivani word-work of Surthur Long-lost in ledger all hope forgotten Yet fast-found for friendship fair the book-bringer Hot comes the huntress Fela, flushed with finding Breathless her breast her high blood rising To ripen the red-cheek rouge-bloom of beauty. "That sort of thing," Simmon said absently, his eyes still scanning the pages in front of him. I saw Fela turn her head to look at Simmon, almost as if she were surprised to see him sitting there. No, it was almost s if up until that point, he'd just been occupying space around her, like a piece of furniture. But this time when she looked at him, she took all of him in. His sandy hair, the line of his jaw, the span of his shoulders beneath his shirt. This time when she looked, she actually *saw* him. Let me say this. It was worth the whole awful , irritating time spent searching the Archives just to watch that moment happen. It was worth blood and the fear of death to see her fall in love with him. Just a little. Just the first faint breath of love, so light she probably didn't notice it herself. It wasn't dramatic, like some bolt of lightning with a crack of thunder following. It was more like when flint strikes steel and the spark fades almost fast for you to see. But still, you know it's there, down where you can't see, kindling.

For Browning, Mr. Pound has always professed strong admiration (see "Mesmerism" in "Personae"); there are traces of him in "Cino" and "Famam Librosque Cano," in the same volume. But it is more profitable to comment upon the variety of metres and the original use of language. Ezra Pound

In “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” Pound had found the inspiration of a moving syntax (as contrasted with the categorical syntax of Joyce, where parts of speech are things). “A true noun, an isolated thing,” we read in the Fenollosa essay, “does not exist in nature. Things are only the terminal points, or rather the meeting points of actions, cross-sections cut through actions, snap-shots. Neither can a pure verb, an abstract motion, be possible in nature. The eye sees noun and verb as one: things in motion, motion in things, and so the Chinese conception tends to represent them.

Each night they left the balcony door open so they could hear the surf lapping against the sand. And, once when the wind was high, and the waves pounded against the beach, he'd smoothed her hair and whispered, after having proved it so, 'Sex is like a storm; it gathers, it roars. And then it settles into stillness.

Hardy’s astonishing technical versatility has won the admiration of major poets from Ezra Pound and Cecil Day Lewis to Philip Larkin. Among other genres he employs the lyric, narrative, ballads, and the sonnet. He also moves easily between the amplitude of dramatic monologue and the compression of imagism. He experiments continually with an ingenious variety of stanza forms and rhyme schemes, rejecting the fluidity of contemporary poetry for his own idiosyncratic style, based on a real understanding of the variety of speech rhythms and registers. Each individual poem is designed to express in its language and form, and with utter honesty, Hardy’s impressions of life.

A dragon grows in leaps and bounds, Like troubles mounting by the pound. Its stature heightens day to day, Imposing dread and deep dismay. A paralyzing roar it gains While from its snout hot fire rains. It sees you shrink. Your fear it knows. And by the hour the nightmare grows. Unless you slay the dragon soon, Your troubles may become your doom.

The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful. From the time he met Tereza, no woman had the right to leave the slightest impression on that part of his brain. Tereza occupied his poetic memory like a despot and exterminated all other trace of other women. That was unfair, because the young woman he made love to on the rug during the storm was not a bit less worthy of poetry than Tereza. She shouted, ‘Close your eyes! Squeeze my hips! Hold me tight!; she could not stand it that when Tomas made love he kept his eyes open, focused and observant, his body ever so slightly arched above her, never pressing against her skin. She did now want him to study her. She wanted to draw him into the magic stream that may be entered only with closed eyes. [..] She wanted to merge with him. [..] 'It’s not sensual pleasure I’m after,’ she would say, 'it’s happiness. And pleasure without happiness is not pleasure.’ In other words, she was pounding on the gate of his poetic memory. But the gate was shut. There was no room for her in his poetic memory. There was room for her only on the rug.

The brain accounts for only 2 percent of the body’s volume, yet consumes 20 percent of the body’s energy. A pearly gray, gelatinous, three-pound universe, this exceptional organ can map parsecs and plot the whereabouts of distant galaxies measured in quintillions of light-years. The brain accomplishes this magic trick without ever having to leave its ensorcelled ovoid cranial shell. From minuscule-wattage electrical currents crisscrossing and ricocheting within its walls, the brain can reconstruct a detailed diorama of how it imagines the Earth appeared four billion years ago. It can generate poetry so achingly beautiful that readers weep, hatred so intense that otherwise rational people revel in the torture of others, and love so oceanic that entwined lovers lose the boundaries of their physical beings.

The Mercy The ship that took my mother to Ellis Island eighty-three years ago was named "The Mercy." She remembers trying to eat a banana without first peeling it and seeing her first orange in the hands of a young Scot, a seaman who gave her a bite and wiped her mouth for her with a red bandana and taught her the word, "orange," saying it patiently over and over. A long autumn voyage, the days darkening with the black waters calming as night came on, then nothing as far as her eyes could see and space without limit rushing off to the corners of creation. She prayed in Russian and Yiddish to find her family in New York, prayers unheard or misunderstood or perhaps ignored by all the powers that swept the waves of darkness before she woke, that kept "The Mercy" afloat while smallpox raged among the passengers and crew until the dead were buried at sea with strange prayers in a tongue she could not fathom. "The Mercy," I read on the yellowing pages of a book I located in a windowless room of the library on 42nd Street, sat thirty-one days offshore in quarantine before the passengers disembarked. There a story ends. Other ships arrived, "Tancred" out of Glasgow, "The Neptune" registered as Danish, "Umberto IV," the list goes on for pages, November gives way to winter, the sea pounds this alien shore. Italian miners from Piemonte dig under towns in western Pennsylvania only to rediscover the same nightmare they left at home. A nine-year-old girl travels all night by train with one suitcase and an orange. She learns that mercy is something you can eat again and again while the juice spills over your chin, you can wipe it away with the back of your hands and you can never get enough.

I don't know you, But I love you, Just as God loves me and you. The sun and the moon are opposing forces, But they still greet each other, Peacefully, As one awakens in the morning, Just as the other goes to sleep. Life has pounded me down and thrashed me around, Time and time again, But I always get right back up, Because I still love life - Just as the earth still loves The rain. ENDURANCE by Suzy Kassem THE SPRING FOR WISDOM Copyright 1993

A turning point in the criticism of Hardy’s poetry came in his centenary year, in which W. H. Auden (1940) recorded his indebtedness to Hardy for his own education in matters of poetic technique. .......................... In a radio interview, Larkin defended his liking for Hardy’s temperament and way of seeing life: ‘He’s not a transcendental writer, he’s not a Yeats, he’s not an Eliot; his subjects are men, the life of men, time and the passing of time, love and the fading of love’. Larkin freely acknowledges the influence on him of Hardy’s verse, which results in his rejection of Yeats as a poetic model. ........................................ It is a similar kind of response that gave rise to an important study by Donald Davie (1973). Davie feels that ‘in British poetry of the last fifty years (as not in America) the most far-reaching influence, for good or ill, has been not Yeats, still less Eliot or Pound, not Lawrence, but Hardy’, and that this influence has been deleterious.

The remoter poetry in particular was replete with effects, an effect being something hypnotic we cannot quite understand, whiteness of moon and wave related to the setting of Time in a manner "too subtle for the intellect." And all over Europe, by the late 19th century, poets had decided that effects were intrinsic to poetry, and were aiming at them by deliberate process. By the end of the century, in France, whole poems have been made "too subtle for the intellect," held together, as effects are, by the extra-semantic affinities of their words. Picking up a name that was once thrown around as their authors, we have learned to call them "Symbolist" poems. In the Symbolist poem the Romantic effect has become a structural principle, and we may say that Symbolism is scientific Romanticism, thus an effort to anticipate the work of time by aiming directly at the kind of existence a poem may have when a thousand years have deprived it of its dandelions and its mythologies, an existence purely linguistic, determined by the molecular bonds of half-understood words.

Poem for My Father You closed the door. I was on the other side, screaming. It was black in your mind. Blacker than burned-out fire. Blacker than poison. Outside everything looked the same. You looked the same. You walked in your body like a living man. But you were not. would you not speak to me for weeks would you hang your coat in the closet without saying hello would you find a shoe out of place and beat me would you come home late would i lose the key would you find my glasses in the garbage would you put me on your knee would you read the bible to me in your smoking jacket after your mother died would you come home drunk and snore would you beat me on the legs would you carry me up the stairs by my hair so that my feet never touch the bottom would you make everything worse to make everything better i believe in god, the father almighty, the maker of heaven, the maker of my heaven and my hell. would you beat my mother would you beat her till she cries like a rabbit would you beat her in a corner of the kitchen while i am in the bathroom trying to bury my head underwater would you carry her to the bed would you put cotton and alcohol on her swollen head would you make love to her hair would you caress her hair would you rub her breasts with ben gay until she stinks would you sleep in the other room in the bed next to me while she sleeps on the pull-out cot would you come on the sheet while i am sleeping. later i look for the spot would you go to embalming school with the last of my mother's money would i see your picture in the book with all the other black boys you were the handsomest would you make the dead look beautiful would the men at the elks club would the rich ladies at funerals would the ugly drunk winos on the street know ben pretty ben regular ben would your father leave you when you were three with a mother who threw butcher knives at you would he leave you with her screaming red hair would he leave you to be smothered by a pillow she put over your head would he send for you during the summer like a rich uncle would you come in pretty corduroys until you were nine and never heard from him again would you hate him would you hate him every time you dragged hundred pound cartons of soap down the stairs into white ladies' basements would you hate him for fucking the woman who gave birth to you hate him flying by her house in the red truck so that other father threw down his hat in the street and stomped on it angry like we never saw him (bye bye to the will of grandpa bye bye to the family fortune bye bye when he stompled that hat, to the gold watch, embalmer's palace, grandbaby's college) mother crying silently, making floating island sending it up to the old man's ulcer would grandmother's diamonds close their heartsparks in the corner of the closet yellow like the eyes of cockroaches? Old man whose sperm swims in my veins, come back in love, come back in pain.

Eliot's understanding of poetic epistemology is a version of Bradley's theory, outlined in our second chapter, that knowing involves immediate, relational, and transcendent stages or levels. The poetic mind, like the ordinary mind, has at least two types of experience: The first consists largely of feeling (falling in love, smelling the cooking, hearing the noise of the typewriter), the second largely of thought (reading Spinoza). The first type of experience is sensuous, and it is also to a great extent monistic or immediate, for it does not require mediation through the mind; it exists before intellectual analysis, before the falling apart of experience into experiencer and experienced. The second type of experience, in contrast, is intellectual (to be known at all, it must be mediated through the mind) and sharply dualistic, in that it involves a breaking down of experience into subject and object. In the mind of the ordinary person, these two types of experience are and remain disparate. In the mind of the poet, these disparate experiences are somehow transcended and amalgamated into a new whole, a whole beyond and yet including subject and object, mind and matter. Eliot illustrates his explanation of poetic epistemology by saying that John Donne did not simply feel his feelings and think his thoughts; he felt his thoughts and thought his feelings. He was able to "feel his thought as immediately as the odour of a rose." Immediately" in this famous simile is a technical term in philosophy, used with precision; it means unmediated through mind, unshattered into subject and object. Falling in love and reading Spinoza typify Eliot's own experiences in the years in which he was writing The Waste Land. These were the exciting and exhausting years in which he met Vivien Haigh-Wood and consummated a disastrous marriage, the years in which he was deeply involved in reading F. H. Bradley, the years in which he was torn between the professions of philosophy and poetry and in which he was in close and frequent contact with such brilliant and stimulating figures as Bertrand Russell and Ezra Pound, the years of the break from his family and homeland, the years in which in every area of his life he seemed to be between broken worlds. The experiences of these years constitute the material of The Waste Land. The relevant biographical details need not be reviewed here, for they are presented in the introduction to The Waste Land Facsimile. For our purposes, it is only necessary to acknowledge what Eliot himself acknowledged: the material of art is always actual life. At the same time, it should also be noted that material in itself is not art. As Eliot argued in his review of Ulysses, "in creation you are responsible for what you can do with material which you must simply accept." For Eliot, the given material included relations with and observations of women, in particular, of his bright but seemingly incurably ill wife Vivien(ne).

Pastor Jón: It is pleasant to listen to the birds chirping. But it would be anything but pleasant if the birds were always chirping the truth. Do you think the golden lining of this cloud we see up there in the atmosphere is true? But whoever isn't ready to live and die for that cloud is a man bereft of happiness. Embi: Should there be lyrical fantasies, then, instead of justice? Pastor Jón: Agreement is what matters. Otherwise everyone will be killed. Embi: Agreement about what? Pastor Jón: It doesn't matter. For instance quick-freezing plants, no matter how bad they are. When I repair a broken lock, do you then think it's an object of value or a lock for some treasure chest? Behind the last lock I mended there was kept one dried skate and three pounds of rye meal. I don't need to describe the enterprise that owns a lock of that kind. But if you hold that earthly life is valid on the whole, you repair such a lock with no less satisfaction than the lock for the National Bank where people think the gold is kept. If you don't like this old, rusty, simple lock that some clumsy blacksmith made for an insignificant food-chest long ago, then there is no reason for you to mend the lock in the big bank. If you only repair machinery in quick-freezing plants that pay, you are not to be envied for your role. Embi: What you say, pastor Jón, may be good poetry, but unfortunately has little relevance to the matter I raised with you - on behalf of the ministry. Pastor Jón: Whoever doesn't live in poetry cannot survive here on earth.

Ezra asked me to bring you this,' I said and handed him the jar. 'He said you would know what it was.' He took the jar and looked at it. Then he threw it at me. It struck me on the chest or the shoulder and rolled down the stairs. 'You son of a bitch,' he said. 'You bastard.' 'Ezra said you might need it,' I said. He countered that by throwing a milk bottle. 'You are sure you don't need it?' I asked. He threw another milk bottle. I retreated and he hit me with yet another milk bottle in the back. Then he shut the door. I picked up the jar which was only slightly cracked and put it in my pocket. 'He did not seem to want the gift of Monsieur Pound," I said to the concierge. 'Perhaps he will be tranquil now,' she said. 'Perhaps he has some of his own,' I said. 'Poor Monsieur Dunning,' she said. The lovers of poetry that Ezra organized rallied to Dunning's aid again eventually. My own intervention and that of the concierge had been unsuccessful. The jar of alleged opium which had been cracked I stored wrapped in waxed paper and carefully tied in one of an old pair of riding boots. When Evan Shipman and I were removing my personal effects from that apartment some years later the boots were still there but the jar was gone. I do not know why Dunning threw the milk bottles at me unless he remembered my lack of credulity the night of his first dying, or whether it was only an innate dislike of my personality. But I remember the happiness that the phrase 'Monsieur Dunning est monté sur le toit et refuse catégoriquement de descendre' gave to Evan Shipman. He believed there was something symbolic about it. I would not know. Perhaps Dunning took me for an agent of evil or of the police. I only know that Ezra tried to be kind to Dunning as he was kind to so many people and I always hoped Dunning was as fine a poet as Ezra believed him to be. For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle. But Ezra, who was a very good poet, played a good game of tennis too. Evan Shipman, who was a very fine poet and who truly did not care if his poems were ever published, felt that it should remain a mystery. 'We need more true mystery in our lives, Hem,' he once said to me. 'The completely unambitious writer and the really good unpublished poem are the things we lack most at this time. There is, of course, the problem of sustenance.

The Kingdom of Heaven,” said the Lord Christ, “is among you.” But what, precisely, is the Kingdom of Heaven? You cannot point to existing specimens, saying, “Lo, here!” or “Lo, there!” You can only experience it. But what is it like, so that when we experience it we may recognize it? Well, it is a change, like being born again and relearning everything from the start. It is secret, living power—like yeast. It is something that grows, like seed. It is precious like buried treasure, like a rich pearl, and you have to pay for it. It is a sharp cleavage through the rich jumble of things which life presents: like fish and rubbish in a draw-net, like wheat and tares; like wisdom and folly; and it carries with it a kind of menacing finality; it is new, yet in a sense it was always there—like turning out a cupboard and finding there your own childhood as well as your present self; it makes demands, it is like an invitation to a royal banquet—gratifying, but not to be disregarded, and you have to live up to it; where it is equal, it seems unjust; where it is just it is clearly not equal—as with the single pound, the diverse talents, the labourers in the vineyard, you have what you bargained for; it knows no compromise between an uncalculating mercy and a terrible justice—like the unmerciful servant, you get what you give; it is helpless in your hands like the King’s Son, but if you slay it, it will judge you; it was from the foundations of the world; it is to come; it is here and now; it is within you. It is recorded that the multitudes sometimes failed to understand. (from The Poetry of Search and the Poetry of Statement,)

I can make you happy,” said he to the back of her head, across the bush. “You shall have a piano in a year or two—farmers’ wives are getting to have pianos now—and I’ll practise up the flute right well to play with you in the evenings.” “Yes; I should like that.” “And have one of those little ten-pound gigs for market—and nice flowers, and birds—cocks and hens I mean, because they be useful,” continued Gabriel, feeling balanced between poetry and practicality. “I should like it very much.” “And a frame for cucumbers—like a gentleman and lady.” “Yes.” “And when the wedding was over, we’d have it put in the newspaper list of marriages.” “Dearly I should like that!” “And the babies in the births—every man jack of ‘em! And at home by the fire, whenever you look up, there I shall be—and whenever I look up there will be you.

In biology, the most basic assumptions of evolutionary theory elude otherwise able students who insist that the process of evolution is guided by a striving toward perfection. College students who have studied economics offer explanations of market forces that are essentially identical to those preferred by college students who have never taken an economics course. Equally severe biases and stereotypes pervade the humanistic segment of the curriculum, from history to art. Students who can discuss in detail the complex causes of the First World War turn right around and explain equally complex current events in terms of the simplest "good guy-bad guy" scenario. (This habit of mind is not absent from political leaders, who are fond of portraying the most complicated international situations along the lines of a Hollywood script.) Those who have studied the intricacies of modern poetry, learning to esteem T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, show little capacity to distinguish masterworks from amateurish drivel once the identity of the author has been hidden from view.

The proper METHOD for studying poetry and good letters is the method of contemporary biologists, that is careful first-hand examination of the matter, and continual COMPARISON of one ‘slide’ or specimen with another. No man is equipped for modern thinking until he has understood the anecdote of Agassiz and the fish: A post-graduate student equipped with honours and diplomas went to Agassiz to receive the final and finishing touches. The great man offered him a small fish and told him to describe it. Post-Graduate Student: “That’s only a sun-fish” Agassiz: “I know that. Write a description of it.” After a few minutes the student returned with the description of the Ichthus Heliodiplodokus, or whatever term is used to conceal the common sunfish from vulgar knowledge, family of Heliichterinkus, etc., as found in textbooks of the subject. Agassiz again told the student to describe the fish. The student produced a four-page essay. Agassiz then told him to look at the fish. At the end of the three weeks the fish was in an advanced state of decomposition, but the student knew something about it. — ABC of Reading (1934; New Directions)

What use is knowing anything if no one is around to watch you know it? Plants reinvent sugar daily and hardly anyone applauds. Once as a boy I sat in a corner covering my ears, singing Quranic verse after Quranic verse. Each syllable was perfect, but only the lonely rumble in my head gave praise. This is why we put mirrors in birdcages, why we turn on lamps to double our shadows. I love my body more than other bodies. When I sleep next to a man, he becomes an extension of my own brilliance. Or rather, he becomes an echo of my own anticlimax. I was delivered from dying like a gift card sent in lieu of a pound of flesh. My escape was mundane, voidable. Now I feed faith to faith, suffer human noise, complain about this or that heartache. The spirit lives in between the parts of a name. It is vulnerable only to silence and forgetting. I am vulnerable to hammers, fire, and any number of poisons. The dream, then: to erupt into a sturdier form, like a wild lotus bursting into its tantrum of blades. There has always been a swarm of hungry ghosts orbiting my body—even now, I can feel them plotting in their luminous diamonds of fog, each eying a rib or a thighbone. They are arranging their plans like worms preparing to rise through the soil. They are ready to die with their kind, dry and stiff above the wet earth.

The Angles Of The Frame 1 Many years have passed since the day, I looked into a mirror, saw a wrinkled face. I've been disclosed to the bulging sands of my bed. 2 Aeons of breath account for the many veins in my atrium. 3 The bull I breast-fed for many years And I've submerged into the frame. 4 I knew the justifications were hard, Hard as against the current of water. No news from the ambiguous points something uncommon. It can't be justified by natural rules, many years we've been tangled on it. 5 This usurped land is a part of all buried treasure islands No finger points in any direction. Lost in the dead-end alleys Tracing images without a compass. 6 Horse pounding pulse sing endlessly in my blood. My kinsmen of horses… Blood-line linked as to rays of a circle like roots of a tree growing deep on the roof. 7 You can't stop the hands of the clock. You can't come back to the broken minutes. The days have been arranged one after another. The knights have left the game one after another. 8 There was a straw mat where you fell asleep. I became numb, quite used to the stillness of the house. 9 Was something supposed to get away from the core to join us? A century has passed and we still live in this house. 10 Dimensions have shifted Not exclusive to the roof The letters approved us as the residents of the house They ran away as the convicts And we got used to the standstill. (Translated from original Persian into English by Rosa Jamali)

What are the great poetical names of the last hundred years or so? Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Landor, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Morris, Rossetti, Swinburne—we may stop there. Of these, all but Keats, Browning, Rossetti were University men, and of these three, Keats, who died young, cut off in his prime, was the only one not fairly well to do. It may seem a brutal thing to say, and it is a sad thing to say: but, as a matter of hard fact, the theory that poetical genius bloweth where it listeth, and equally in poor and rich, holds little truth. As a matter of hard fact, nine out of those twelve were University men: which means that somehow or other they procured the means to get the best education England can give. As a matter of hard fact, of the remaining three you know that Browning was well to do, and I challenge you that, if he had not been well to do, he would no more have attained to write Saul or The Ring and the Book than Ruskin would have attained to writing Modern Painters if his father had not dealt prosperously in business. Rossetti had a small private income; and, moreover, he painted. There remains but Keats; whom Atropos slew young, as she slew John Clare in a mad-house, and James Thomson by the laudanum he took to drug disappointment. These are dreadful facts, but let us face them. It is—however dishonouring to us as a nation—certain that, by some fault in our commonwealth, the poor poet has not in these days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog’s chance. Believe me—and I have spent a great part of ten years in watching some three hundred and twenty elementary schools, we may prate of democracy, but actually, a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born.’ (cit. The Art of Writing, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch) Nobody could put the point more plainly. ‘The poor poet has not in these days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog’s chance . . . a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born.’ That is it. Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one’s own. However, thanks to the toils of those obscure women in the past, of whom I wish we knew more, thanks, curiously enough to two wars, the Crimean which let Florence Nightingale out of her drawing-room, and the European War which opened the doors to the average woman some sixty years later, these evils are in the way to be bettered. Otherwise you would not be here tonight, and your chance of earning five hundred pounds a year, precarious as I am afraid that it still is, would be minute in the extreme.

You should date a girl who reads. Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes, who has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve. Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she has found the book she wants. You see that weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a secondhand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow and worn. She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book. Buy her another cup of coffee. Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice. It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas, for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry and in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does. She has to give it a shot somehow. Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world. Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who read understand that all things must come to end, but that you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two. Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series. If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are. You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype. You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots. Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads. Or better yet, date a girl who writes.

Like,” he repeats with distaste. “How about I tell you what I don’t like? I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be—basically, gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful—nonfiction only, please. I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children’s books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and—I imagine this goes without saying—vampires. I rarely stock debuts, chick lit, poetry, or translations. I would prefer not to stock series, but the demands of my pocketbook require me to. For your part, you needn’t tell me about the ‘next big series’ until it is ensconced on the New York Times Best Sellers list. Above all, Ms. Loman, I find slim literary memoirs about little old men whose little old wives have died from cancer to be absolutely intolerable. No matter how well written the sales rep claims they are. No matter how many copies you promise I’ll sell on Mother’s Day.” Amelia blushes, though she is angry more than embarrassed. She agrees with some of what A.J. has said, but his manner is unnecessarily insulting. Knightley Press doesn’t even sell half of that stuff anyway. She studies him. He is older than Amelia but not by much, not by more than ten years. He is too young to like so little. “What do you like?” she asks. “Everything else,” he says. “I will also admit to an occasional weakness for short-story collections. Customers never want to buy them though.” There is only one short-story collection on Amelia’s list, a debut. Amelia hasn’t read the whole thing, and time dictates that she probably won’t, but she liked the first story. An American sixth-grade class and an Indian sixth-grade class participate in an international pen pal program. The narrator is an Indian kid in the American class who keeps feeding comical misinformation about Indian culture to the Americans. She clears her throat, which is still terribly dry. “The Year Bombay Became Mumbai. I think it will have special int—” “No,” he says. “I haven’t even told you what it’s about yet.” “Just no.” “But why?” “If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll admit that you’re only telling me about it because I’m partially Indian and you think this will be my special interest. Am I right?” Amelia imagines smashing the ancient computer over his head. “I’m telling you about this because you said you liked short stories! And it’s the only one on my list. And for the record”—here, she lies—“it’s completely wonderful from start to finish. Even if it is a debut. “And do you know what else? I love debuts. I love discovering something new. It’s part of the whole reason I do this job.” Amelia rises. Her head is pounding. Maybe she does drink too much? Her head is pounding and her heart is, too. “Do you want my opinion?” “Not particularly,” he says. “What are you, twenty-five?” “Mr. Fikry, this is a lovely store, but if you continue in this this this”—as a child, she stuttered and it occasionally returns when she is upset; she clears her throat—“this backward way of thinking, there won’t be an Island Books before too long.

Canto I And then went down to the ship, Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and We set up mast and sail on that swart ship, Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward Bore us out onward with bellying canvas, Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess. Then sat we amidships, wind jamming the tiller, Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea till day’s end. Sun to his slumber, shadows o’er all the ocean, Came we then to the bounds of deepest water, To the Kimmerian lands, and peopled cities Covered with close-webbed mist, unpierced ever With glitter of sun-rays Nor with stars stretched, nor looking back from heaven Swartest night stretched over wretched men there. The ocean flowing backward, came we then to the place Aforesaid by Circe. Here did they rites, Perimedes and Eurylochus, And drawing sword from my hip I dug the ell-square pitkin; Poured we libations unto each the dead, First mead and then sweet wine, water mixed with white flour. Then prayed I many a prayer to the sickly death’s-heads; As set in Ithaca, sterile bulls of the best For sacrifice, heaping the pyre with goods, A sheep to Tiresias only, black and a bell-sheep. Dark blood flowed in the fosse, Souls out of Erebus, cadaverous dead, of brides Of youths and of the old who had borne much; Souls stained with recent tears, girls tender, Men many, mauled with bronze lance heads, Battle spoil, bearing yet dreory arms, These many crowded about me; with shouting, Pallor upon me, cried to my men for more beasts; Slaughtered the herds, sheep slain of bronze; Poured ointment, cried to the gods, To Pluto the strong, and praised Proserpine; Unsheathed the narrow sword, I sat to keep off the impetuous impotent dead, Till I should hear Tiresias. But first Elpenor came, our friend Elpenor, Unburied, cast on the wide earth, Limbs that we left in the house of Circe, Unwept, unwrapped in sepulchre, since toils urged other. Pitiful spirit. And I cried in hurried speech: “Elpenor, how art thou come to this dark coast? “Cam’st thou afoot, outstripping seamen?” And he in heavy speech: “Ill fate and abundant wine. I slept in Circe’s ingle. “Going down the long ladder unguarded, “I fell against the buttress, “Shattered the nape-nerve, the soul sought Avernus. “But thou, O King, I bid remember me, unwept, unburied, “Heap up mine arms, be tomb by sea-bord, and inscribed: “A man of no fortune, and with a name to come. “And set my oar up, that I swung mid fellows.” And Anticlea came, whom I beat off, and then Tiresias Theban, Holding his golden wand, knew me, and spoke first: “A second time? why? man of ill star, “Facing the sunless dead and this joyless region? “Stand from the fosse, leave me my bloody bever “For soothsay.” And I stepped back, And he strong with the blood, said then: “Odysseus “Shalt return through spiteful Neptune, over dark seas, “Lose all companions.” And then Anticlea came. Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus, In officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer. And he sailed, by Sirens and thence outward and away And unto Circe. Venerandam, In the Cretan’s phrase, with the golden crown, Aphrodite, Cypri munimenta sortita est, mirthful, orichalchi, with golden Girdles and breast bands, thou with dark eyelids Bearing the golden bough of Argicida. So that:

Newton, a devout Puritan believer, has anecdote that when he claimed that no disciple had God, he refused to claim atheism, saying, "Do not speak disrespectfully about God, I am studying God." He paid much attention to the Bible and had an eschatological belief that the Saints would resurrect and live in heaven and reign with Christ invisibly. And even after the day of judgment, people would continue to live on the ground, thinking that it would be forever, not only for a thousand years. According to historian Steven Snowovell, he thought that the presence of Christ would be in the distant future centuries after, because he was very pessimistic about the deeply rooted ideas that denied the Trinity around him. He thought that before the great tribulation came, the gospel activity had to be on a global scale. 카톡【AKR331】텔레【RDH705】라인【SPR331】위커【SPR705】 믿고 주문해주세요~저희는 제품판매를 고객님들과 신용과신뢰의 거래로 하고있습니다. 24시간 문의상담과 서울 경기지방은 퀵으로도 가능합니다 믿고 주문하시면좋은인연으로 vip고객님으로 모시겠습니다. 원하시는제품있으시면 추천상으로 구입문의 도와드릴수있습니다 ☆100%정품보장 ☆총알배송 ☆투명한 가격 ☆편한 상담 ☆끝내주는 서비스 ☆고객님 정보 보호 ☆깔끔한 거래 포폴,에토미,알약수면제 판매하고있습니다 Newton studied alchemy as a hobby, and his research notes were about three books. Newton served as a member of parliament on the recommendation of the University of Cambridge, but his character was silent and unable to adapt to the life of a parliamentarian. When he lived in the National Assembly for a year, the only thing he said was "Shut the door!" In Newton's "Optics" Volume 4, he tried to introduce the theory of unification that covered all of physics and solved his chosen tasks, but he went out with a candle on his desk, and his private diamond threw a candle There is a story that all of his research, which has not been published yet, has turned to ashes. Newton was also appointed to the president of the Minting Service, who said he enjoyed grabbing and executing the counterfeiters. Newton was a woman who was engaged to be a young man, but because he was so engaged in research and work he could not go on to marriage, and he lived alone for the rest of his life. He regarded poetry as "a kind of ingenious nonsense." [6] Newton was talented in crafting inventions by hand (for reference, Newton's craftsmanship was so good at his childhood that when he was a primary school student he was running his own spinning wheel after school, A child who throws a stone and breaks down a spinning wheel, so there is an anecdote that an angry Newton scatters the child.) He said he created a lantern fountain that could be carried around as a student at Cambridge University. Thanks to this, it was said that students who were going to attend the Thanksgiving ceremony (Episcopal Mass) were able to go to the Anglican Church in the university easily. Newton lost 20,000 pounds due to a South Sea company stock discovery, when "I can calculate the movement of the celestial body, but I can not measure the insanity of a human being" ("I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men ").

XXVII Caliban A dip in lethe & Heart pounding ceases my frozen heart melts A warm  healing wash & I awake to my own breathing I Long for another draught of darkness Cover the mirrors Make the coffee black like that River Find quiet dark corners During the day in which to weep

At last Dirmit came upon a way. One by one, she took the words from her head and put them into her heart. When a word made her heart pound she wrote it down at once. When it had no effect she cast it out. From that day forward, Dirmit became a slave to her heart, doing what it told her to do, going where it told her to go, saying what it told her to say.

The burning coals turned red, What's gulped down won't come back. The tiger is lurking in the high steppes, they say, The Kyrgyz heart is pounding... Will the Kyrgyz, locked up, now die, alas? Will every one of our people become a Chinaman, alas? Will it put fear in the heart, alas? Will the ugly-faced dark Chinese, Enjoy trampling us down, alas?

If the bible comes and peddles phobia, I'll burn such bible to ashes. If the koran comes and peddles violence, I'll tear up such koran to pieces. If the vedas come and peddle superstition, I'll crush such filth to pulp with my foot. If the constitution comes and peddles war, As concerned parent I'll grab their makers, And spank out all their dormant good. Even if some two-bit God comes, And peddles division, I'll divide him so many times, Even to his apostles, He'll bear no recognition. And a little word of advise to those, Priming their guns, swords and tridents. When a volcano erupts, Insects are supposed to run, Not hide behind bows, arrows and bibles. Brain is mightier than bullets, Heart is mightier than the homunculus. When a 3 pound brain falls on bigoted bugs, There is no running, only burning to cinders.

Red wine and Hennessy She fell out of her bottle when she fell into love, cup running over, overflowing emotions in glass- red stained palet, on a pallet on the grass, to a quilt on the floor -affixed between lips and red lipstick on a shirt that he wore. A familiar place, she know she's been here before Reminiscent of the evening On his shirt that she tore ............ Drop by drop, puddle in glass getting lower- impressions in her gut, rim of her glass, hour glass figure moves counter clockwise - while absorbing the contents of merlot. Hard liquor and fine wine ............. Red Wine and Hennessy A wicked twist on some champagne tips French nails, manicures over grapes Whoever said wine and liquor don't mix? Last night I had six Bottle caps, corks, bedazzled juice Merlot was her name - slim waist - good taste slinger neck, red lace. Long stem, pedestal - hands embraced her face ............. room temperature, her body temperature ... personality of two, she's mellow and chill... aged to perfection- pop the seal- watch the erection ... splatters on the floor- covers the rug, Residue of red lipstick- Merlot stained lips match the kiss on his neck ............ Chasing fantasy through the Red Sea While chasing that with a white BC How much will she pour- how much will she drink How much more before her ship sinks ........... A full body lush, blackberry crush Medium sized Bordeaux Intense velvety plum I asked her where she's from She said she's international She's longer thinking rational .......... Sips in sync with blinking eyes She sips too much to realize Every time you pour into me, my bottle gets more empty- Glass falling to the floor She staggers to the door Glass shatters her feet She stumbles to her seat She's still asking for more But she falls to the floor Red lipstick in the mud She covers up the blood ............ She lays in her wine She forgot about the time Clock on the wall Footsteps in the hall Pounding in her head She rushes to the bed ......... She lays motionless ... but her head is racing Her heart is pacing Her lungs are gasping - air, she needs air Rolls to her side, brings her self to sit up She gags and gags until She throws it all up- ........... Wakes up the next morning Dazed and confused She's laying in a bed That she's not used to She moves slowly, where did everyone go? She checks the time- it's a quarter pass 4 sounds on the other side of the door Are Muffled by the sound of a knock at the door ........... Looks around for her little red dress Notices a blotch - a red stain on her breast Lipstick smeared an accessory to her mess She reached for her clothes and saw a note on the desk. .......... Dearly beloved, I want to see you again I'd love to have to back I think we make a great blend I tried to wake you Because I had to go And Oh by the way, my name is merlot "Little Black Bird

Brave, Sound & Sane (The Sonnet) Brave is not the one who has no dark corners in their mind, Brave is the one who is friends with their dark corners. Courageous is not the one who never sheds a single tear, Courageous is the one who draws strength from their tears. A sound mind is not one that has no superstition, A sound mind is one that has a grip over its superstition. A sane mind is not one that does not believe in fiction, A sane mind is one that knows good fiction from bad fiction. Education is needed, but not mere education of the head, What's really needed is education of the whole being. It is easy to fill the head with facts and figures, Use a fact to lift the world, then you're an educated being. More than in head and body, we gotta grow up in heart. A billion pounds of head is worthless, if there is no heart.

The Woman Who Could Not Live With Her Faulty Heart I do not mean the symbol of love, a candy shape to decorate cakes with, the heart that is supposed to belong or break; I mean this lump of muscle that contracts like a flayed biceps, purple-blue, with its skin of suet, its skin of gristle, this isolate, this caved hermit, unshelled turtle, this one lungful of blood, no happy plateful. All hearts float in their own deep oceans of no light, wetblack and glimmering, their four mouths gulping like fish. Hearts are said to pound: this is to be expected, the heart’s regular struggle against being drowned. But most hearts say, I want, I want, I want, I want. My heart is more duplicitous, though to twin as I once thought. It says, I want, I don’t want, I want, and then a pause. It forces me to listen, and at night it is the infra-red third eye that remains open while the other two are sleeping but refuses to say what it has seen. It is a constant pestering in my ears, a caught moth, limping drum, a child’s fist beating itself against the bedsprings: I want, I don’t want. How can one live with such a heart? Long ago I gave up singing to it, it will never be satisfied or lulled. One night I will say to it: Heart, be still, and it will.

Newton, a devout Puritan believer, has anecdote that when he claimed that no disciple had God, he refused to claim atheism, saying, "Do not speak disrespectfully about God, I am studying God." He paid much attention to the Bible and had an eschatological belief that the Saints would resurrect and live in heaven and reign with Christ invisibly. And even after the day of judgment, people would continue to live on the ground, thinking that it would be forever, not only for a thousand years. According to historian Steven Snowovell, he thought that the presence of Christ would be in the distant future centuries after, because he was very pessimistic about the deeply rooted ideas that denied the Trinity around him. He thought that before the great tribulation came, the gospel activity had to be on a global scale. 카톡pak6 텔레:【JRJR331】텔레:【TTZZZ6】라인【TTZZ6】 믿고 주문해주세요~저희는 제품판매를 고객님들과 신용과신뢰의 거래로 하고있습니다. 24시간 문의상담과 서울 경기지방은 퀵으로도 가능합니다 믿고 주문하시면좋은인연으로 vip고객님으로 모시겠습니다. 원하시는제품있으시면 추천상으로 구입문의 도와드릴수있습니다 ☆100%정품보장 ☆총알배송 ☆투명한 가격 ☆편한 상담 ☆끝내주는 서비스 ☆고객님 정보 보호 ☆깔끔한 거래 포폴,에토미,알약수면제 판매하고있습니다 Newton studied alchemy as a hobby, and his research notes were about three books. Newton served as a member of parliament on the recommendation of the University of Cambridge, but his character was silent and unable to adapt to the life of a parliamentarian. When he lived in the National Assembly for a year, the only thing he said was "Shut the door!" In Newton's "Optics" Volume 4, he tried to introduce the theory of unification that covered all of physics and solved his chosen tasks, but he went out with a candle on his desk, and his private diamond threw a candle There is a story that all of his research, which has not been published yet, has turned to ashes. Newton was also appointed to the president of the Minting Service, who said he enjoyed grabbing and executing the counterfeiters. Newton was a woman who was engaged to be a young man, but because he was so engaged in research and work he could not go on to marriage, and he lived alone for the rest of his life. He regarded poetry as "a kind of ingenious nonsense." [6] Newton was talented in crafting inventions by hand (for reference, Newton's craftsmanship was so good at his childhood that when he was a primary school student he was running his own spinning wheel after school, A child who throws a stone and breaks down a spinning wheel, so there is an anecdote that an angry Newton scatters the child.) He said he created a lantern fountain that could be carried around as a student at Cambridge University. Thanks to this, it was said that students who were going to attend the Thanksgiving ceremony (Episcopal Mass) were able to go to the Anglican Church in the university easily. Newton lost 20,000 pounds due to a South Sea company stock discovery, when "I can calculate the movement of the celestial body, but I can not measure the insanity of a human being" ("I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men ").

Before meeting you I was introduced to you Now I am criticized of my love For you. I weighed 187 pounds Now I am shamed & cannot Find clothes my size. It seems that everyone I meet is conscious of my health Except I. I am spoon deep in you I am made of you

Love-Abiding Law (The Sonnet) Love is the master-key to social troubles, Law is but an inferior and cheaper stand-in. Instead of obsessing over cooking up more law, Let's shift the focus on loving and caring. Do you think love is nothing but a commercial object, With your olympian authority which you can legalize! Who do you think you are that you'll legalize order! You can legalize toys, telephones, not love and light. Know your place, o puny apes, on a puny little blue dot, Before standing as authority bearing your badge of law. There are more things in the vastness of time and space, Than dreamt up in your paleolithic construct of law. An ounce of love brings more change than a 100 pounds of law. What we need is not law-abiding love, but love-abiding law.

He had not been able to see it in himself, but looking at Hungerford, he was able at least to speculate on the possibility that fear, raw, physical fear, had a kind of gift to give, too. Who but the terrified has heard his own heart pounding, listened to his own stertorous breathing, wishing that heart and lungs would be more quiet, and yet learning in their pulsation the lessons of rhythm and metrics? (Anagrams, p. 80)

Pound thought better than he practiced in this particular instance, for his Metro poem was supposedly a pure example of what he meant by Vorticism: “The image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce call a vortex; from which and through which and into which ideas are constantly rushing. It is as true for the painting and the sculpture as it is for poetry.

I was born in Berwyn, Illinois. At the time, the doctors declared, with deadpan gravitas, “Boy, six pounds, eight ounces.” I was circumcised and remain so, unable or unwilling to grow a fresh foreskin in the years since. Unable, actually, as I have tried—I’ve used creams and pills and all manner of massage, but it’s no use. Fresh foreskin forsakes me, it foils me, it fails to flower on the face of my glans. And that’s the final bit of poetry in this book.

Listen," Francois said. "Yonder is Paris --laughing, tragic Paris, who once had need of a singer to proclaim her splendor and all her misery. Fate made the man; in necessity's mortar she pounded his soul into the shape Fate needed. To king's courts she lifted him; to thieves' hovels she thrust him down; and past Lutetia's palaces and abbeys and taverns and lupanars and gutters and prisons and its very gallows--past each in turn the man was dragged, that he might make the Song of Paris. He could not have made it here in the smug Rue Saint Jacques. Well! the song is made, Catherine. So long as Paris endures, Francois Villon will be remembered. Villon the singer Fate fashioned as was needful: and, in this fashioning, Villon the man was damned in body and soul. And by God! the song was worth it!

And Unto thine eyes my heart Sendeth old dreams of the spring-time, Yea of wood-ways my rime Found thee and flowers in and of all streams That sang low burthen, and of roses, That lost their dew-bowed petals for the dreams We scattered o'er them passing by.

Dylan’s antagonism towards critical opinion has never been complete. Naturally, he has thought of his work as being regarded as ‘up there with the greats’. Talking to Robert Shelton, Dylan remarked that: “Until Bringing It All Back Home song-writing was a sideline. I was still a performer. Then I knew I had to write songs… Get some of those literary people, some of those poetry people to sit down with my records … that would be good.” This was soon after declaring “I never dug Pound or Eliot. I dig Shakespeare”, in Spring 1966.35

This ocean, humiliating in its disguises Tougher than anything. No one listens to poetry. The ocean Does not mean to be listened to. A drop Or crash of water. It means Nothing. It Is bread and butter Pepper and salt. The death That young men hope for. Aimlessly It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No One listens to poetry. — Jack Spicer, “This ocean, humiliating in its disguises,” The Collected Books of Jack Spicer. (Black Sparrow Books; First Edition edition July 1975)

A 10 ounce book brings more peace than a 20 pounds machine gun.

A 10 ounce book brings more peace, Than a 20 pounds machine gun. A 3 pound brain brings more order, Than 300 pounds of uranium.

at eleven years old the doctor weighed me & afterward, my mother told me i was too fat & that i needed to go on a diet immediately. for an entire. year, food barely passed through my lips. i did not even allow myself to take a sip of water because i wanted to be so thin that i could blow away with the slightest breeze- d i s a p p e a r . i dropped sixty pounds in a few short months & i had to wear long sleeves to cover up my only catharsis. - everybody told me how good i looked, though

at eleven years old the doctor weighed me & afterward, my mother told me i was too fat & that i needed to go on a diet immediately. for an entire year, food barely passed through my lips. i did not even allow myself to take a sip of water because i wanted to be so thin that i could blow away with the slightest breeze- d i s a p p e a r . i dropped sixty pounds in a few short months & i had to wear long sleeves to cover up my only catharsis. - everybody told me how good i looked, though

Tereza occupied his poetic memory like a despot and exterminated all trace of other women. That was unfair, because the young woman he made love to on the rug during the storm was not a bit less worthy of poetry than Tereza. She shouted 'Close your eyes! Squeeze my hips! Hold me tight!'; she could not stand it that when Tomas made love he kept his eyes open, focused and observant, his body ever so slightly arched above her, never pressing against her skin. She did not stream that may be entered only with closed eyes. The reason she refused to get down on all fours was that in that position their bodies did not touch at all and he could observe her from a distance of several feet. She hated that distance. She wanted to merge with him. That is why, looking him straight in the eye, she insisted she had not had an orgasm even though the rug was fairly dripping with it. 'It's not sensual pleasure I'm after,' she would say, 'it's happiness. And pleasure without happiness is not pleasure.' In other words, she was pounding on the gate of his poetic memory. But the gate was shut. There was no room for her in his poetic memory. There was a room for her only on the rug.

The government cheese… The cheese of the government may be tempered with real cheese powders however it’s constantly not the best thing you should eat in the world. You can make a traditional grilled cheese sandwich. With American cheese which is just vegetable oil with food coloring as well as the skim of milk. However, that’s just government milk with government oil to make governments grilled cheese sandwich so be the nation can afford to eat. Nothing wrong with that at all. It’s humbling to know the value of a dollar. Compare it to the sales at every single store. You find government cheese made by companies that have been around since the 1900s. There are many cheeses of the world. Every single country makes cheese. Some really good ones and some that smell like someone cut the cheese. The government cheese can be put on a hamburger, which isn’t made of ham at all. The cheese can be melted to broccoli or put in macaroni and cheese as a quick meal with vegetables if any kind basically that is just homemade some sort of helper, then. As to the box of the content we all know as to all have eaten in our lifetime says so in really big letters. In directions anyone can understand. The government cheese can be put in that as well. For it will taste really good, nonetheless. All hail the government cheese. It’s affordable as well as delicious if you don’t like other cheeses. It can be melted to be slopped on chili cheese dogs. At every bbq in every household across the world. So don’t make fun of government cheese for there is also government bread as well as government water as well as many other governments benefits you can enjoy. Again, we can all hail at the government cheese. Now the people that can part between the sarcasm as to the appreciation of the government cheese. Successfully I have portrayed the explanation of government assistance to feed the population food that they can afford. Until they figure out that growing food your self is even more affordable as to it still giving respect to the government cheese. It’s also more rewarding when you have abundance of what you need right there fresh grown as you then know where it came from and that it wasn’t pumped full of high fructose corn syrup. That most of us are not even aware of this fun fact that they do to add weight to the money that they make per pound that you spend your money on. Wasteful don’t you think when you can eat one watermelon of 30lbs, and you know it’s right and the vitamins are real.

Pisanello painted horses so that one remembers the painting, and the Duke of Milan sent him to Bologna to BUY horses. Why a similar kind of 'horse sense' can't be applied in the study of literature is, and has always been, beyond my comprehension. Pisanello had to LOOK at the horses. You would think that anyone wanting to know about poetry would do one of two things or both. I.E. LOOK AT it or listen to it. He might even think about it? And if he wanted advice he would go to someone who KNEW something about it.

More writers fail from lack of character than from lack of intelligence. Technical solidity is not attained without at least some persistence. The chief cause of false writing is economic. Many writers need or want money. These writers could be cured by an application of banknotes. The next cause is the desire men have to tell what they don't know, or to pass off an emptiness for a fullness. They are discontented with what they have to say and want to make a pint of comprehension fill up a gallon of verbiage. An author having a very small amount of true contents can make it the basis of formal and durable mastery, provided he neither inflates nor falsifies [...] The plenum of letters is not bounded by primaeval exclusivity functioning against any kind of human being or talent, but only against false coiners, men who will not dip their metal in the acid of known or accessible fact.